Users desire to receive high definition (HD) or ultra-high definition (UHD) video content over the Internet. The current state of the Internet supports streaming of HD or UHD quality video, but congestion of communication links is one of many problems caused by limited bandwidth. Internet networks often accelerate delivery of video content by reducing the transmission rate of the video content streamed to an end user client device. Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) Media Transport (MMT) is a multimedia transport that supports advanced features such as content-aware streaming, content-aware networking, and layer-aware forward error correction (FEC). When a network is congested, the advanced features of MMT enable a transmitting device to both reduce the transmission rate by dropping certain packets and to control quality degradation by using metrics to select less important packets to be dropped. Peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM) are metrics that characterize quantization-induced distortion. However, the PSNR and SSIM metrics do not characterize the distortion induced by frame drops, which is different from quantization-induced distortion.
In MMT, an Asset Delivery Characteristic (ADC) entity includes quality of service (QoS) parameters to alleviate bottlenecks and to facilitate better network router operation in content-aware traffic shaping. The current state of the Internet transmits the ADC (including QoS infatuation) at the asset level, but routers can operate at a different level of granularity (namely, a segment level that is finer than the asset level). Also, the current ADC entity does not include information that specifies the streaming time packet drop decisions and consequences in quality of experience (QoE).